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Marriage and Martyrdom: How ISIS is Winning Women

Last March 11, was a normal Thursday morning for the Ali Mehenni family, or so Kamel Ali Mehenni thought when he dropped off his 17-year-old daughter Sahra at the train station on her way to school. It was only that evening, when Sahra failed to meet her father at the station, that it became clear something was amiss. Even then the family thought the quiet, plump-cheeked teenager with a soft smile might have missed her train or gone out with friends.

Sahra, from Lézignan-Corbières in a wine-producing region of southern France, never went to school that day. Instead, she took a train to a nearby airport and flew alone to Turkey— to join ISIS jihadists on the warfront in Syria.

How a quiet young French woman from a mixed Muslim-Catholic family with five children was convinced to exchange her home in the south of France to one in the north…